A collection of recent announcement in the “brain games” or “brain training games” space:

The Wii sets new generational standards for the videogame industry

• “The ageing of the Japanese population compelled gamemaker Nintendo to widen its audience. Now, the Wii is leading the industry standards. But hardcore gamers are still too important to be neglected.”

Strain your brain the smart way

• “George Harrison, Nintendo’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications, has said that more than half of the company’s marketing for Wii is aimed at adults. And the system has been presented at conventions for the aging “gray gamer” population.” and talks about sudoku, Brain Age, Big Brain Academy, and more.

SBT Announces the Acquisition of Quixit

• “Scientific Brain Training (”SBT”), based in Lyon, France, today has announced that it has acquired all of the outstanding shares of privately held Quixit, Inc. SBT was previously a minority shareholder of Quixit. Effective today, Quixit will be renamed HAPPYneuron, Inc.”

Lumos Labs just announced the release of lumosity. MyBrainTrainer and BrainBuilder are still around.

Let me add our 2 cents to the conversation:

- Lifelong learning and brain exercise/ mental stimulation have been shown to reduce the probability of developing Alzheimer’s-related symptoms as we age. Now, no one specific program has shown so far that it is better than another one in this regard. Some programs have shown good results at training and improving specific cognitive skills, which is different. You can learn more at Alzheimer’s Disease: too serious to play with headlines.

- How can one distinguish what is entertainment (which is not bad at all, but has unproven cognitive enhancement benefits) vs. real brain fitness programs? We suggest that, before buying any program, you get clear answers to the questions in the Brain Fitness Checklist below. A very important question is number 2: if you want programs with solid science behind, look for the name of the scientist behind in the PubMed database, “a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s.” Good quality peer-reviewed research will appear there.

For more information on each question, see:

	10 Questions to Choose the Right Brain Fitness Program for You Download
	10 Questions to Choose the Right Brain Fitness Program for You (bookmark size) Download

You can find more information in our Brain Fitness Topics section. Please let us know if you have any suggestions-thanks!